I shot the timelapse below in the Ragged Mountains Roadless Area in western Colorado for a campaign to stop energy development there. The journal entry is from that same night.
……………………….
The night woke me.
Her hair brushed across my face, and I fell from her embrace into her presence. I blinked. It was almost midnight.
I unzipped my tent and crawled out. I hadn’t needed the tent – the clouds were gone, the ground was dry and hard, and I stumbled as though the earth beneath my feet had swayed gently.
The meadow, cold and silent, was drifting through space. The pines around the edge were the end of the earth, and as I stood watching, a star shot past and disappeared behind them.
I looked around and saw the Milky Way rising overhead, shooting skyward from one large tree at the edge of the clearing, and I realized that this was what she had woken me for – to see her tapestry spread out above the meadow across an unimaginable stretch of millennia – a million, million dreams laughing and crying in silence, and here was this little clearing floating among them in the long flowing locks of night.
Hours went by as the hard ground tilted slowly through the night sky and we watched each other until finally she was swallowed up by the rush of morning.
Piano music performed by Patryce King.